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Sunday, January 25, 2009

Everything old is new again, except when those old things are actually based on older things, thus making them somehow even older than they already were.

Context: Watching the weird American version of BBC tonight, I saw the opening half-hour to Goldfinger, which I hadn’t seen since I was a kid. (I was so young, in fact, that I didn’t see any reason why Pussy Galore wasn’t a perfectly fine name for a lady.) During the scene in which James Bond discovers the corpse of Jill Masterson — painted in gold and displayed on Bond’s hotel bed, nude but ever-so-tastefully — the score recalls the opening chords of the famous “Goldfinger” theme, but in a quiet, somber way befitting the scene. This music was sampled throughout the 1996 song “Six Underground,” by Sneaker Pimps — a high school throwback reference if there ever was one. Time was, at the dawn of my freshman year, that you couldn’t listen to alternative rock radio without hearing “Six Underground” once an hour.

Hear it for yourself. First “Six Underground.”

And now the score to the tragic death of Jill Masterson.

It’s also worth noting that the song became especially popular when it was included on the soundtrack to the 1997 Val Kilmer film The Saint, the most recent incarnation of the adventures involving a man named Simon Templar. If you wanted, you could draw some parallels between Templar and Bond. They’re not exactly the same, but both men have more in common with each other than they would with, say, Sarah Plain and Tall or William “The Refrigerator” Perry.